A search for the intangible
I've spent two very full days in Melbourne — split by two equally full days with family in Warrnambool. They've been two very different environments to be in. Only one of these environments has left me feeling content. I found myself sitting in the job interviews, talking about the details of the roles, my work processes and how I deal with challenges, and in each one I told much the same story. I was delivering what is by now a relatively well-rehearsed presentation, with a few conditional variations included based on the context of the interview, and any relevant experience that may have been obtained since I last trotted it out.
There's something a little artificial about it all though that makes me recoil a little. People keep asking me which direction I want to go in next, and truth be told, I'm not really sure. DIAC has muddied the water, that's for certain. Most of my time there has been spent longing to work with code again, but when I get the opportunity I find myself wanting to step away from that a little and work more at the user experience level. Although the work I've been doing there in recent months has been much more rewarding than it was to begin with, I find it frustrating that I was having to find ways to fix problems that are so elementary to me, but to the department and the carpetbaggers that have convinced the department of their ability to deliver something, these solutions are incomprehensible.
I invested a lot of time and energy into getting my CSS/XHTML knowledge to where it is, and suddenly casting that aside in favour of another area of user experience is something I'm not quite ready for, even though I know that for career advancement, it's probably something I'll inevitably have to do if I am to move up the food chain.
The problem therein is, I have to decide if going further up the food chain is something I really want to do. After all, the web was more something I just fell into. I never really sought it out as a career option. Since I moved to Canberra, my writing has suffered more and more, to the extent I almost never do it now, aside from here in my journal. I need to write, more than any other creative outlet, but it needs the space of time for the words to flow, and in a commercial world where everything is about money, that time is not really affordable.
It seems that almost everything I try my hand at, doesn't quite sustain me creatively; at least, not enough for me to obsess about it to the exclusion of all else. I can't see things changing too much in the coming year either, as I seek to push forward with my photography, but also keep my writing happening (and actually try and nurture it back to life again). The embers are still glowing, though in recent years they've been growing cold.
Time to address that.